I currently follow an annoying workflow when importing cards because of the risk of matching existing cards in more than one language (e.g. Chinese and Japanese words written with the same characters). I’ve created a note type that works for a number of languages so that any improvements I make to the design carry over to all the languages I study, but it has the downside that when I import, the ‘when first field matches’ options run the risk of matching the first field in any language. To avoid that, my current workflow looks like this:
- Create a list of words to import in a given language
- Change all notes of the language I’m about to import to a dummy type with the same fields and same cards.
- Import the new notes - sometimes ignoring if first field matches, sometimes modifying, depending on the task, almost never importing anyway in the case of a first field match
- Change all the notes of the dummy type back to the normal type
And that works fine, except that every time I do it, I have to upload my whole collection to the cloud, and I’m always nervous that I’ll accidentally swap fields or cards in the conversion. Does anyone have a suggestion for a better workflow to import when ‘first field matches’ could hit multiple unrelated cards?
I’m aware of add-ons that add a unique ID as the first field, but that doesn’t suit my use case because I do want to be able to match on the first field. What I’d really like as a feature is the ability to perform actions only in the case that cards match in multiple fields (every card has a ‘Language’ field, in my case), but I haven’t seen an add-on that provides that functionality. Alternatively, restricting the matches to the deck I’m importing into would also work for my case, because each language has its own deck.